BIO

Jef Gunn is a painter, printmaker and sometimes sculptor, working in Portland, Oregon. Gunn attends to the relationship between consciousness and the phenomenal world, expressed in simple large forms of Nature drawn from memory of experience in wilderness and urban environs, concentrated into shapes, text, pattern and signs. "I don't know if I care much about self expression. In relation to the wilderness or the city, what is a self? Art is mind revealing mind."

In September 2006, he co-curated "Impulse," a national show of encaustic painting and sculpture at the Portland Art Canter. He is represented by the William Traver Gallery in Seattle and Tacoma, Washington, and by Augen Gallery in Portland. Gunn has participated in many important Northwest group exhibits, such as "Grace," at the Art Gym (Marylhurst University), curated by Sarah Ellen Taylor in 2001; the "Tool Show" and "Garden Show," both curated by Paul Arensmeyer for Portland Institute for Contemporary Art (1996 and 1997, respectively). He had a painting retrospective at Oregon State University in 1995. In the late 1980s he fulfilled two residencies in Europe: la Cité International des Arts in Paris, France; and another in Barcelona, Spain, where he made studio work and exhibited at the Cercle Artistic de Sant Lluc and in local galleries. Gunn earned a BFA in painting from Marylhurst University in 2005. He led a group of artists on a tour of museums, galleries and artist studios in Barcelona in March 2007 and will lead other tours in Winter/Spring 2009.

Interests: Asian philosophies, history and aesthetics; 20th/ 21st century art and music; language and philology; poetry; music; mythology. Other skills: woodworking, outdoorsmanship, encaustic painting, foreign language skills (Spanish, French, learning Japanese)

I grew up in the 50s and 60s, along the West Coast from Seattle and Portland to Pasadena and Honolulu. Learned to paint in the 70s in Central California; moved back to the NW for the light and a crazy love for damp and darkness. Over that now; I really rather like it on the East side of the state and other sunny places. Extended periods of study in both Barcelona and Paris in the 1980s had a strong hand in developing my methods of painting and understanding of art. All that has been leavened by attitudes and practices of pre-modern Asian art : Sung to Ming dynasties in China; Kamakura to Edo to Meiji periods in Japan. These painters were modern before the West knew what it meant.

Si usted desea cualquiera información en Español, favor de escribirnos a info@jefgunn.com.

RESUME [.pdf]

WHAT I AM AWARE OF IN THE STUDIO

SHAPE                   certainty            modulation            ambiguity

COLOUR                contrasts:        hue            simultaneous            saturation

MATERIAL             playful interchange            found material (junk)            rarified (eg. gold leaf)

ACCIDENT             readiness            facilitation             dissection & reassembly